Why Office 2010 won’t support Windows XP 64-bit

When the system requirements for Microsoft Office 2010 were first posted, we noticed that Windows XP 64-bit was mysteriously absent. We contacted Microsoft, and the company explained that while deciding on which versions of Windows to support in the next release of Office, it weighed the user experience behind the versions against broadly dropping support.

"For the Microsoft Office 2010 release, we will not support Windows XP 64-bit," a Microsoft spokesperson confirmed with Ars. Upon further inspection, we also noticed Windows Server 2003 support was missing. "For the best productivity and user experience, the benefits of 64-bit computing with Office 2010 is best experienced by utilizing the newly introduced 64-bit version of Office 2010 with Windows 7 (64-bit) or Windows Vista (64-bit) version." In short, Microsoft does not think the experience will be good enough on its previous operating systems.

For the sake of comparison, here are the supported versions of Windows for Office 2010 and its two predecessors (for newer releases of Windows, older versions of Office may require service packs to work):

Office 2007: Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, Windows 7, and Windows Server 2008 R2. Office 2007 is a 32-bit application that will run on a 64-bit version of Windows, but there may be some feature limitations.

While this is the first time the software giant is releasing 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Office, and on one DVD no less, it's a bit disappointing that neither of them will work on Windows XP 64-bit or Windows Server 2003.

Frankly, we believe Microsoft would kill off Windows XP 32-bit support for Office 2010, which is scheduled for release in June 2010, if it could. Alas, Windows XP 32-bit is still the world's most popular operating system, so the software giant is grudgingly porting everything it needs to make Office 2010 work on the eight-year-old OS.